Saturday, March 28, 2009

My Sassy Girl

2008, US, directed by Yann SamuellThe first five minutes of My Sassy Girl put me in mind of a director with a severe case of Amélie overload - hardly surprising when I discovered the perpetrator was Yann Samuell, who displayed the same affliction in his 2003 Jeux d'enfants. Nominally a remake of a Korean film I've not seen, great chunks of this effort feel like retreads of Samuell's first film. Where he could previously rely on Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard, both strong actors, to help paper the cracks here he's working with Elisha Cuthbert and Jesse Bradford: pleasant enough at times but not really capable of investing this silliness with any conviction. There are lots of visual ideas at work, but Samuell needs to work on the basics before thinking about the decorations: the plotting is nonsensical and Cuthbert's character is so fundamentally unsympathetic that the entire premise is fatally undermined.